Playlist: Bookmarks
Tournament of Mythological Creatures
Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?
Tournament of Not-So-Famous Inventors
Which inventor and invention will win the tournament?
What’s In My Brain: Ball vs Book
Let’s look at Kinetic vs Potential Energy!
Domesticated Animals Tournament
Which domesticated animal will win the tournament?
Path Cipher (Codes Part 4)
Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.
Zig Zag Cipher (Codes Part 3)
Let’s try a cipher that doesn’t substitute new letters or shapes. We just mix things up.
Pig Pen Cipher (Codes Part 2)
Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game
Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?
Tournament of Presidents
So who was the strangest of these eight presidents?
How Many Will There Be? Xs and Os
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
A Lunar Survival Mission
A favorite of mine! This task is delightfully complex and ambiguous, forcing students to make choices without enough information and with no right answer. How will they survive on the moon for three days?
An Escher-Style Tessellation Project
Create a piece of repeating art in the style of MC Escher!
Addition: 3 Digits Plus 2 Digits (Multiple Solutions)
Typical practice problems don’t move students up Bloom’s Taxonomy. With this framework, you’ll see kids stop and really think about how to approach multi-digit addition.
Holiday vs Holiday (from a Mascot’s Perspective)
Want something to do during the holiday season that is both fun and involves thinking? Get students writing about what a snowman would think about Halloween or what a ghost would think about Thanksgiving.
What If There Were No Hundreds Place?
Imagine a world with no hundreds place. We’d have to call it ten tens instead. But then, what would we call the thousands place? How would we read 9999? What if we added one more?
Disneyland Parking Structure Math Project
Your students will use estimation strategies to figure out how many parking spots are there in the parking structure at Disneyland? And you bet I reveal the real answer!
The Personalities of Rocks
What would an igneous rock be like? Would it get along with a sedimentary rock? Could they handle the hot personality of a metamorphic rock?
Student Introductions With Depth and Frames
Want to introduce the tools of Depth and Complexity and learn more about your students and introduce the Frame graphic organizer? Have I got the activity for you!
Math Curiosity: Magic Squares
Imagine a 3×3 square in which every row, column, and diagonal have the same sum. That’s a magic square!
Math Curiosity: The Coloring Problem
No video gets me more email from students! How few colors can you use to color in any map so that no two, neighboring regions are the same color?
The Resiliency Tournament
Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.
More Specific than “Smart”
When students are told that they’re “smart”, what does this word actually mean to them? (Psst. It isn’t what we intended.)
Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle
What if this triangle pattern just kept repeating… forever!?
The Thinking Hats
So… do your students moan when forced to work in a group? Part of the problem is that lack the structure to work well with peers. Edward de Bono’s Thinking Hats are a perfect tool to help with this problem.
Academic Love Letters
What if Kylo Ren wrote a love letter to Abe Lincoln or the Sahara Desert wrote one to the Moon?
Create A Civilization Introduction
Your students build a civilization from scratch — rivers, flags, calendars, currency, government. Social studies, science, and writing woven into one year-long project.
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Nothing could possibly go wrong with a love potion on the loose!
The Game of 100
Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?
Engineering: Build A Bridge
Using real bridges as their starting point, students will construct bridges out of straws and paperclips.
Better Stories Part 1: The Big Idea
We open our unit on narrative writing with a big idea: “structure increases creativity.” I show how this is true by bringing in examples from across all disciplines.